We’re pleased to announce that the Open Data Foundation North America 2008 meeting will take place at the Washington DC Office of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) on December 3rd and 4th. This regional event is open to all members as well as individuals and agencies interested to learn more about ODaF, get involved in our activities, or simply share ideas.

We are a currently drafting the agenda. The theme will be “Socio-Economic (meta)data and related technologies in federal and state agencies” with a focus on the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange Standard (SDMX). The first day will start with a brief introduction of ODaF and an update on completed, ongoing and planned activities. This will be followed by a brief overview of DDI / SDMX and presentations by other participants. The second day will focus on ideas, suggestions and discussions on participants issues and of the action plan for moving the organization forward in the North America region. If you wish to make a short presentation of your organization’s activities or a particular topic, please let us know and we’ll do our best to integrate to in the program.

For information and registration, please visit:
http://opendatafoundation.org/events/odaf_northamerica_2008.php

We would like to express thanks the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) for its support and assistance in making this event possible.

The Next Frontier in Documenting Survey Data: What Data Producers and Archivists Need to Know about DDI, XML and SDMX
December 2, 2008
9:30am – 3:30pm EDT
4350 East West Highway Suite 800
Bethesda, MD 20814

This free, 1-day workshop, sponsored by NORC at the University of Chicago in collaboration with the Open Data Foundation, is intended for a non-technical audience and is targeted at data producers and archivists. The objectives of the workshop are twofold:
- To provide an introduction to the basics of some emerging data documentation standards, such as the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and Statistical
Data and Metadata Exchange Standard (SDMX) and
- To encourage adoption of these emerging data documentation standards.

See attached brochure for further information.

PLEASE RSVP to Timothy M. Mulcahy by November 17, 2008
@ mulcahy-tim@norc.uchicago.edu
Or call 301-634-9352

Using DDI 3.0 to Support Preservation, Management, Access, and Dissemination Systems for Social Science Data

November 3 - 7, 2008
GESIS Workshop at the Leibniz Center for Informatics
Schloss Dagstuhl, Wadern, Germany

Course Instructors:
Arofan Gregory (Open Data Foundation, Tucson, Arizona, USA)
Wendy L. Thomas (Minnesota Population Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA)
Joachim Wackerow (GESIS-ZUMA, Mannheim, Germany)

The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) has produced an international XML standard for the use of lifecycle information about social science research data. Version 3.0 was published in April 2008. DDI facilitates the automation of documentation and production systems for the delivery of social science data. This workshop is geared toward the staff of archives and data producing agencies. The five-day structure of this workshop provides the participants with an opportunity for in-depth assistance on the specialized features of DDI that are important to their organization’s activities.

New features in DDI 3.0 support:
- metadata capture from planning and production to dissemination and analysis
- reuse of metadata to drive subsequent production or analysis processes
- ISO 11179 compliant data registries such as question, variable, and concept banks
- grouping of study series for longitudinal and comparative research
- capturing comparative information for the creation of harmonized data
- improved capture of archival information for data organization and management

The workshop provides the opportunity to get an in-depth look at this major new release of DDI. The workshop is organized in cooperation with the DDI Alliance. Further information on DDI can be found below.

Intended audience: anyone interested in DDI, no prior knowledge of DDI or XML is required.

Further information on the workshop is available at the GESIS workshop pages:
http://www.gesis.org/Veranstaltungen/ZUMA/Workshops/WS_2008/DDI_2008-11.htm

May 21, 2008 — The Alliance for the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is pleased to announce the official release of Version 3.0 of the DDI XML specification for documenting social science data. This long awaited version of the DDI represents a major advance by fully incorporating XML Schemas and moving to a data life cycle approach. We thank all the members of the DDI working groups as well as DDI users who have volunteered their time and efforts over the past years to make this specification a reality.

The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is a project to create an international standard in XML for metadata describing social science data. The DDI Alliance is a self-sustaining membership organization whose members guide the development of the DDI specification.

For further information, visit http://www.ddialliance.org/ddi3/ or contact ddi@ddialliance.org.

At the occasion of its 39th session, the United Nations Statistical Council recognized SDMX as the preferred standard for the exchange and sharing of data and metadata (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/statcom/doc08/DraftReport-English.pdf).

The recommendation was put forward by the Committee for for Coordination of Social Statistics (CCSA) in the conclusions of its ninth and tenth
sessions (http://sdmx.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/2008-26-ccsa-e.pdf) and based on its technical report on common open standards for the exchange and sharing of data and metadata (http://sdmx.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/2008-13-sdmx-e.pdf).

The United Nations Statistical Commission, established in 1947, is the apex entity of the global statistical system. It brings together the Chief Statisticians from member states from around the world. It is the highest decision making body for international statistical activities especially the setting of statistical standards, the development of concepts and methods and their implementation at the national and international level.

The objectives of the Committee for the Coordination of Statistical Activities (CCSA), established in September 2002,1 are to promote coordination among the statistical programmes of international organizations, to provide coordinated outputs for the treatment of statistical issues in intergovernmental meetings, including the United Nations Statistical Commission, to foster good practices in the structuring and programming of statistical activities in international organizations and, ultimately to achthrough the coordination of activities.

For further information, see:
http://sdmx.org/?p=106
http://sdmx.org
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/statcom/commission.htm
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/workpartner_ccsa.htm

Candidate Release Version 3 (CR3) is now available from the DDI Alliance Web site at: http://www.ddialliance.org/ddi3/index.html. The “Latest Release” link will take you to SourceForge for the actual download.

We are getting very close to having a final version of DDI 3.0 to vote on in April. The timetable for publication is:
Final version available: April 3
Review period: April 4-20
Alliance vote: April 21-27
Official publication of DDI 3.0: April 28

Between now and April 3, the Technical Implementation Committee (TIC) is continuing to make corrections to the schema on a weekly basis. Developers who need to work with the most current copy should check SourceForge regularly. All of the subsequent revisions to CR3 will be labeled as CR3 but with different dates. The version log in SourceForge will indicate the changes made since the last update so that developers can check to see if any changes have taken place that might affect their work. Specific questions about updates can be directed to the TIC at ddi-srg@icpsr.umich.edu.

The Open Data Foundation is pleased to announce that an ODaF Europe 2008 meeting will take place at the UK Data Archive on April 14-15. This regional event is open to all members as well as individuals and agencies interested to learn more about ODaF or to share ideas. For further information and registration, see
http://www.opendatafoundation.org/events/odaf_europe_2008.php

Looking into the future, we currently anticipate holding a US regional meeting on Oct 2-3 at the Sun Microsystems headquarters in Manhattan, NY and our Annual Meeting in Washington DC in December. The Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA) in Germany and the Open Data Foundation (ODaF) are also happy to announce that ODaF Europe 2009 will be hosted on the IZA campus in Bonn next spring (details to be announced in time).

This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board. The OpenID Foundation was formed in early 2006 by seven community members with the goal of helping promote, protect and enabling the OpenID technologies and community. Today’s announcement marks a milestone in the maturity and impact that the OpenID community has had.

The DDI Foundation Tools Program (DDI-FTP) is pleased to announce the availability of a new web site dedicated to DDI Tools at http://tools.ddialliance.org

The site is intended for DDI users and developers and provides access to applications, software components, documentation, example files and XSL transformations that support the DDI-XML specification. It is also the home for the DDI Foundation Tools Program, an initiative aiming to provide application developers with a set of reusable components, operating in a harmonized environment based on open source technologies, to manage DDI metadata and their related data and resources (http://tools.ddialliance.org/?lvl1=ftp).

The launch of the site coincides with the initial release of the DDI-FTP Road Map (http://tools.ddialliance.org/?lvl1=ftp&lvl2=roadmap), a document that describes and prioritizes the different components of the toolkit, to be used by contributors to focus and coordinate their development efforts.

As always, we wish for the web site and the tools program to be community driven and your comments and suggestions are most welcomed. Agencies or individuals interested in contributing to the DDI-FTP are also encouraged to read more about the initiative or contact us for further information.

All the best,

The DDI-FTP team
tools@ddialliance.org

DDI, the Data Documentation Initiative, is the “codebook standard” for quantitative social datasets. This new briefing paper from the DataShare project explains the DDI as a form of metadata, how version 3 embraces a life-cycle approach to data management, and how the DDI could be exploited by OAI-compliant data repositories.

DDI and Institutional Repositories, by Luis Martinez, released 1 February, 2008.

See also http://www.disc-uk.org/deliverables.html for other project deliverables.